"Cold Weather"

It’s inter­est­ing and some­times a little odd how people can admire a film equally, but for almost entirely dif­fer­ent reas­ons, or maybe I ought to say qual­it­ies. Manohla Dargis, in her beau­ti­fully turned and prac­tic­ally rap­tur­ous review of Aaron Katz’s new film Cold Weather, writes that the film “con­cerns young people mov­ing from a pre­oc­cupy­ing sense of self to an embra­cing under­stand­ing of anoth­er human being.” And that’s true, and it’s all well and good, but that’s not the qual­ity of the film that makes me love it, that made me find it so trans­port­ing. (And a good thing, too, as every­body knows that I com­pletely hate “young people,” and don’t care if they ever embrace under­stand­ing of any­thing, and in fact would be per­fectly happy if they all walked off of a cliff.)

No, what I love…or, okay, one thing I love about Cold Weather is the way Katz sus­pends his char­ac­ters between a gor­geous, lyr­ic­al, leis­urely, often goo­fily funny sim­u­la­tion of reality—the set­ting is a very sens­it­ively shot Portland, Oregon, and thereabout—and a full-on house of fic­tion, if you will. The ostens­ible mys­tery that the film’s Sherlock-Holmes-loving prot­ag­on­ist Doug (Cris Lankenau) finds him­self drawn into is replete with poten­tially sen­sa­tion­al­ist genre ele­ments: a suit­case full of money, the pro­duc­tion of por­no­graphy, a pos­sibly dan­ger­ous man who wears a cow­boy hat, all that sort of thing. But every time the story turns a corner and the whole enter­prise could be seen as hav­ing the poten­tial to fall face-first into the Hitchcockian or even the Lynchian, Katz does a wry pull­back that returns the view­er to some artist­ic iter­a­tion of the quotidian…that’s also…not…quite…quotidian. Just as the very title and premise of his last fea­ture, Quiet City, seemed to rev­el in a kind of para­dox, so too does this pic­ture take ele­ments of thrillers and more con­ven­tion­al char­ac­ter stud­ies and mix them in a way that makes the per­spect­ives and atmo­spheres here seem utterly new. Richard Brody, at his blog, points out two Godard, or at least Godardian, nods in the film (although he does not note the pra­cit­ic­ally Karina-esque cheekbones and eyes of the film’s lead act­ress, Trieste Kelly Dunn, seen below). There’s also, since we’re on the sub­ject, there’s a pretty amus­ing lift from Bernard Herrmann’s North by Northwest score in Keegan DeWitt’s music for the film.

But one ought not infer from these ref­er­ences that this is some kind of aca­dem­ic exer­cise in clev­er post mod­ern­ism. Look at the way the Sherlock Holmes motif is worked into the story and you see that an inter­ac­tion with cul­ture is a big part of Katz’s theme, but it’s not a fruit­less med­it­a­tion, or some­thing done for its own sake; it’s meant to add up to some­thing lar­ger, and it does, without get­ting gran­di­ose about it.This is not a film that needs any spe­cial plead­ing, explan­a­tions, or asso­ci­ations with non-existent move­ments to explain or jus­ti­fy it. It’s a full-blown, full-blooded piece of American art cinema that’s com­pletely worth your time and money. 

And here I need to revert to my old-school and per­haps anti­quated sense of journ­al­ist­ic eth­ics and dis­close that Mr. Katz is what one would call a friendly acquaint­ance of mine. It’s not like we, you know, “hang out,” but he is a cous­in of someone I con­sider a good friend and an ath­let­ic inspir­a­tion, and in fact I first met him in that con­text, so take that for what you will. 

UPDATE: My friends at MSN Movies are also big on Katz’s film, so they asked me to reshape and expand on some of the above thoughts for the pur­poses of some­thing like a “prop­er” review. The notice is here.